The Nature of Personality; A Course of Lectures (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...more highly developed, the more completely unified and integrated is the personality, the more capable is it of sustained happiness in spite of inter-current pains of all sorts. In the child, or in the adult of imperfectly developed and unified personality, the pleasure or pain of the moment is apt to fill or dominate the whole of consciousness as a simple wave of feeling, whereas in the perfected personality it appears as a mere ripple on the surface of a strong tide that sets steadily in one direction. "If this account of happiness is correct, it follows that to add to the sum of happiness is not merely to add to the sum of pleasures, but is rather to contribute to the development of higher forms of personality, personalities capable, not merely of pleasure, as the animals are, but of happiness. If this conclusion is sound, it is of no small importance to the social sciences; it goes far to reconcile the doctrine of such moralists as T. H. Green with that of the more enlightened utilitarians, for the one party insists that the proper end of moral effort is the development of personalities, the other that it is the increase of happiness, and these we now see to be identical ends."1 That gives us one reason why the consistently indulgent man is not truly free: the other reason is that we are born members of a society. Many of our impulses are such that their indulgence is bad for society; in other words, we are not born good citizens. But we are born members of society, with a strong social instinct, a desire for the approval of our fellows, and so on. If the purely selfish man is to be even contented, he must either stifle this desire, as is perhaps impossible, or else endure its permanent non-satisfaction. If this social instinct in its manifol...